Sunday, January 6, 2013

THE FUTURE OF WEB DESIGN

THE FUTURE OF WEB DESIGN

Just what is the future of web design?

The future of web design is a hot topic right now, with many designers voicing their hopes and wishful thinking; some realistic and some bizarrely out there. Let’s start with a bit of perspective by refreshing our minds to web design in past, old trends and styles.

The Verdict

The good the bad and the ugly:

Historically the websites that were attractive to look at and easy to use were sparse generally owned by the big companies, the ones who had the money to employ people with design experience to make their websites for them.

There was very little community feedback from users in the past compared to today's plethora of blogs and social networking (excluding your treasured guest book entries of course). So average users seemed to focus on making websites mainly for themselves and close friends or family not mass consumption.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

Social Networking

Social media is the in thing at the moment, users of the web want interaction and want to voice their opinions. As of the beginning of 2011, Facebook has 500,000,000 users, that's about 1 in every 13 people on earth. Everybody has their use for social media websites, whether it’s keeping in touch with friends, promoting your business, following your favourite celebrities or an array of other uses.

Blogging & Content Management

The static website is dying, long live Content Management Systems! Todays web designers start most of their projects by heading to wordpress.org or their CMS of choice’s website to download the latest version of the software that will be the base of their project.

Using free blank themes such as: BLANK, Whiteboard and Starkers for Wordpress; designers can start with a clean slate and build their designs around the workings of the CMS.

High Quality Templates

Pre-made website templates have always been around, but with the popularity of Content Management Systems today getting a website online is a lot more accessible for average users and this works in advantage of the designer, especially for those designers who make their living building ultra high quality premium templates.

The result of this is a veritable smorgasbord of beautiful templates for your blog, CMS or online store just waiting to be installed.

Accessibility and Usability

Usability has been a buzz word in the web design industry for a long time now, so long in fact that even clients have cottoned on to it and are telling us which standards we need to meet, and how they should be easy to use and coded semantically; well the latter not so much but I'd definitely be a little better off if I had pound and/or dollar for the amount of times a client has told me to make it "all web two point oh" and "use The HTML 5"